It's 1970something, and I'm still in high school. My best pal, CW, and I drive down to New Orleans with her mom to see the Rolling Stones play at the Superdome. Van Halen is the opening act. I only remember a few things about this trip, mainly because it was so long ago. I remember sitting in some French Quarter restaurant eating a fried oyster po’boy and French fries, and drinking an ice tea. Of course, being a Southerner, I can tell you what I ate thirty years ago, but I can't tell you much else.
Our waitress was this waif of a woman, with an apron slung low across her hips. She was short on manners, and very matter of fact, but she got the job done quickly and efficiently.
I remember I had half the po’boy in my mouth, and Fleetwood Mac's Rhiannon played in the background. All of a sudden, the waitress bounded across the dining room and grabbed the massive wrought iron handle to the large wooden door, a relic from the last century, with wood gray from the years and the weather. She slammed the door shut and flung her body across the frame. Three guys approach and stop cold.
“What’s wrong? Wasn’t the service good?” she asks.
“Yeah,” one of the guys says.
“Then why didn’t you leave a tip?”
It was the first time I understood the word audacious, and I knew right then and there, whoever this woman was, I liked her style.
A few years later, CW and I are back in New Orleans with some college friends. We’re freshman. We’ve been inside a club, and when we come out, we realize our car has been towed or stolen. We see some policemen up the street. We walk up and realize that they have two guys with them, about our age. The guys are handcuffed. We ask one of the police officers what we should do about the car. Before he can answer, the other one answers a call on his radio.
“We gotta go,” he says to his partner. “There’s been a knifing.”
They uncuff the guys and leave us standing there with them. We look at the criminals, they look at us.
freed
“You ladies want to go have a drink?”
We did not, and begged off, using our missing car as an excuse.
Then there was the time another good friend, AC, and I drove to New Orleans from the University of Southern Mississippi, where he went to school. There was a car full of us, all hellions determined to kill some brain cells and create a night we’d never forget. Mission accomplished. At the end of a long evening, we sat in the Café Du Monde after hours of drinking and ingesting god knows what, and we ordered the house specialty, beignets. The beignets were warm and light in my hands, the powdered sugar coating the pads of my fingers. I stuck one finger in my mouth licked off a sweet glob of it and believed with every cell in my body that this was the best thing I had ever tasted.
Every evening of every road trip to New Orleans always ended up with beignets at Café Du Monde.
Later, I would travel to New Orleans with my husband for short vacations. We usually tried a different hotel each trip, but there were always a few traditions. Muffaletto at the Central Grocery, cocktails at NOLAs, burgers at the Camilla Grill, and, of course, Café Du Monde.
Sometimes we’d walk through Audubon Park or visit the zoo. The old oaks with the thick, low branches veiled with Spanish moss were, for me, the main attraction. My dream home was any one of the number of the two story clapboard houses bordering the park. I imagined professors from Tulane living there, and I thought of the wonderful things each house must have held, the great books, the wonderful, interesting, colorful art, indicative of local artists, and, typical of me, the wine, bought from Martins Cellar.
We always threatened to take the backwater cruises but never did. AC and I always talked wistfully about planning a reunion of the friends who took that road trip to New Orleans that night long ago. We never did. Every time my husband and I went to New Orleans, we always said we needed to make time to visit it at least once a year. We never did.
Everyone in that city is devastated by what’s happened. Their lives have changed. Their lives, as they knew it, have ceased to exist. The people in New Orleans tonight live worse than the poorest neighborhoods in India. That’s saying something.
It’s too soon to say what will happen to this city, that when it recovers, what it will be like? My fear is that the place we loved, the place where no one ever had a bad time, is gone. I’m not saying that the people will just move away. In fact, logically, I know that to a certain extent, life will go on as it did before. There will still be Zydeco and gumbo and beignets even. But so many of the town’s buildings are ruined, and part of New Orleans allure is its old, ragged architecture. I have images of a new town, condos, clean, track homes, taking the place of the old, beautiful, shabby ones. You can rebuild a town, but you can’t rebuild the charisma.
And as for those people, how do they start over? When everything is taken away from you, all your possessions, your home, your neighborhood, your job, where do you begin again? And what do you do in the time that it takes to rebuild New Orleans?
As for me, as soon as the city is open for business, I plan to book a trip. I want to show this town that gave me so many good times my support. New Orleans was never just a city to me. It was an ongoing promise of decadence yet neither me nor New Orleans could live up to the expectation. At the same time, it’s a town that always gave me pleasure. And lots and lots of good memories. And hangovers. And weight gain. But that’s why I loved the place, at least, that’s one reason.
